Books: Pre-War

THE FATE OF MAN — H. G. Wells —Alliance ($2.50).

To write books with titles like The Fate of Man has been the fate of Herbert George Wells, one of the chief planetary and interplanetary influences of his era. When Wells’s worlds are too much with them, modern critics are inclined to forget that Joseph Conrad admired his prose, that T. S. Eliot esteemed his criticism, and that the imagination he brought to popularizing science was a vigorous and useful article.

The Fate of Man, finished last summer, is Wells’s pre-war answer to a challenge to describe “the world as I see it and what is happening to it.” Scanning the globe and the human ephemerae upon it from the point of view of a millionaire in years, Wells still considers that “Nazi Germany may well bring down conclusive disaster on our species.” For war, once a selective elimination of “the young male surplus,” has become through technology a prodigious wastage. Wells sees general enlightenment as the only hope. Against groups that he thinks impede it he lets his anger ride.

> Of the British Empire: “[It] is farther off now from anything that can be recognized as a democracy than it was 30 years ago.”

> Of the Roman Catholic Church: “Why do intelligent people accept this strange heap of mental corruption as a religion and a way of life?”

> Of Marxism: “I have watched the tradition of Marxian bad manners and Marxian dogmatism wrapping like a blanket of fog round the minds of two crucial generations.”

> Of Russia: “A giant with the head of a newt.”

Wells urges his favorite project of a new World Encyclopaedia or “World Brain,” but his sense of humor bitterly tells him that even if endowed it might fall into the hands of Nicholas Murray Butler. “I am impatient and at the same time I do not know how to accelerate matters,” says H. G. Wells. “I do not think this is simply a case of the distress of an old man in a hurry.”